It will take cooperation to tackle transportation needs

When life is fair, all municipal and county entities in both Beaufort and Jasper counties will heed the words of Alexander Graham Bell and apply them to intergovernmental cooperation when he said “When one door closes another door opens; but we so often look so long and so regretfully upon the closed door, that we do not see the ones which open for us.”

With the recently closed door as it applies to economic development between the two counties, when Jasper County opted to pursue a more favorable alliance with the Southern Carolina Economic Development Alliance, another opportunity for pooling their resources for the greater good is on the horizon in the form of the federally mandated Metropolitan Planning Organization, MPO.

Now this MPO is designed to deal primarily with transportation issues and projects proposed within its yet to be approved boundaries and funding for it will come from the Federal government through the South Carolina Department of Transportation, a scary thought indeed to have those two bloated bodies determining funding for anything.

However putting that concern aside, the most recent proposed area for this MPO to control includes almost all of Southern Beaufort County, the municipalities of Beaufort, and Port Royal, plus some areas of unincorporated Jasper County along the important Interstate 95 corridor and Hardeeville. These areas have the most potential for city like growth in the next 20 years thus increasing the pool of money that could be received from the feds.

The key to this would appear to be once again who gets a vote on where the funds are spent, control, control, control. This issue alone was prominent in the demise of the economic alliance between the two counties.

Nevertheless, lo and behold, the proposal being circulated would give almost equal voting rights to all of the municipalities and the two counties. Since based on population alone, which was the defining factor in having to create this MPO; Hilton Head could rightly claim they should have more than one vote thus greater influence in the distribution of funded projects in the future.

To their credit they appear to be receptive to the heretofore-unacceptable notion to most governmental entities that as Mr. Spock stated, “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few or the one.”

If this spirit of cooperation was to continue and the guidelines were approved by all involved parties, the newly formed MPO could begin to address and support important transportation issues that affect all of us such as the repaving and widening of I-95. With the new redistricting structures in all of the legislatures and our increased representation in Columbia and even Washington, perhaps presenting a united front under a common cause to the benefit of all parties would begin to dissolve the current atmosphere of distrust among local governments.